Centerfold

For three years, Sefa Aumua has crossed his name off the list.

Every fall the Bellhaven Firefighters' Calendar goes up in every dentist's office on the coast, and every fall the biggest man at Station 12 refuses to pose for it. He is thirty-seven, six foot four and two hundred and sixty pounds of former rugby forward, with warm golden-brown skin, thick black hair tied up in a knot over shaved sides, and a full black beard. He is a captain's exam away from a desk. He does not stand in front of fire engines in his suspenders.

He also has a business card in his wallet that he has never called, gone soft at the corners from three years behind his license.

Nikhil Rao shoots magazine portraits in Seattle and the calendar for free. He is thirty-four, six foot one and ripped, with medium brown skin, tousled black hair, a neat black beard and a stare that misses nothing through a lens. He has photographed eleven hundred people. He has never once touched one. That is the rule.

This year the station voted nineteen to one, and the vote put Sefa in front of Nikhil's lights, shirtless and barefoot against the red lacquer of the restored 1956 engine he spent four hundred hours painting. It's a hundred degrees under the softboxes. The crew is upstairs, heckling. And the tones can drop at any second, and send every one of them out the door.

The camera is set to fire every three seconds. Somebody is about to break a rule.